Bewitched

The actor Ben Whishaw pulled up in a black car the other day and popped into an East Village store called Enchantments, which specializes in essential oils, talismans, books of spells, and other witchy accoutrements. A black cat leaped onto the cash register. “That’s Medea,” the shop’s owner, Stacy Rapp, said. “The Greek Medea, not the Tyler Perry Madea.”

Whishaw, who is thirty-five, bashful, and from Bedfordshire, caressed the cat—he used to own several, but gave them to his grandmother when his film career exploded, eight years ago. He is best known for playing Q in the two latest Bond films: not the crusty old gadget-maker made famous by Desmond Llewelyn but a coy young tech geek with a windswept mop of hair. He is frequently cast as a writer (John Keats, in “Bright Star”; Herman Melville, in “In the Heart of the Sea”), a rocker (Bob Dylan, or a slice of him, in “I’m Not There”; Freddie Mercury, possibly, in a long-rumored bio-pic), or a lover (he pined for Eddie Redmayne in “The Danish Girl”).

Now he’s tackling a Puritan: he stars as John Proctor in a Broadway revival of “The Crucible,” Arthur Miller’s McCarthy-minded drama about the Salem witch trials, directed by the Belgian experimentalist Ivo van Hove. During rehearsals, Whishaw had heard about Enchantments from his co-star Tavi Gevinson, the nineteen-year-old actress and the editor of the online magazine Rookie, who goes there for candles.

“Spells are basically a tool,” Rapp explained. “A spell is a tool to focus your energy in a specific direction. We do get a lot of people in your line of work coming in, saying, ‘I’m up for a big role, I have this audition, I need some luck.’ ”

Whishaw said that he does own crystals, which he bought in Glastonbury, a pagan pilgrimage site. “I have a smoky quartz, a beautiful smoky quartz, which I brought with me from the U.K. I’m going to take it to the theatre and just have it in the dressing room. I don’t know why. I like it there.”

“Quartz is cleansing,” Rapp assured him. She changed a light bulb as Whishaw looked around, the floor creaking underfoot. He paused by a shelf of ceramic skulls. He had not spent much time studying the historical Salem, he said, noting that Miller had strayed from fact. “In actuality, John Proctor was in his sixties, and Abigail was really young—she was twelve.” (On Broadway, she’s played by Saoirse Ronan, who is twenty-one.) He peered up. “What are in these bottles here?”

“These are oils,” Rapp said, and drew Whishaw’s attention to a root called Devil’s shoestring. “The Puritans were big on the Devil.”

“In the play, any sinful behavior is the Devil at work,” Whishaw said. “So if you have sinned as John Proctor has sinned, in the sin of lechery, you have been touched by the Devil. It gets very complex, because he’s also a good man, but he’s done this awful thing.”

Rapp said that she had been to Salem several times. “It’s gotten very touristy. I’m not crazy about it.”

“People going on witch tours and things?” Whishaw said. He winced. “It’s easy, because it’s so long ago, for people to go, ‘Oh, witches! Dunkings! Trials!’ But actually it’s terrifying. I mean, they were executing people. It’s barbaric.”

Rapp sat down under a sign that read “The Witch Is In” and asked Whishaw, “How does it feel playing someone like this, seeing as you seem to have some belief in magic?”

“I think what you were saying about Puritanism is very important,” Whishaw said, crouching down to stroke Medea again. “They were like Christian fundamentalists.”

“They left England because it was too relaxed religiously?”

“Yeah,” Whishaw said. “They were like religious refugees, because the Puritans were being persecuted.”

“So they turned around and did the exact same thing,” Rapp said. “It reminds me what things were like back in the day. I’m lucky I can actually own a shop like this. In certain countries it’s still illegal.” (Saudi Arabia has an anti-witchcraft police unit, and Swaziland has threatened to fine anyone flying a broomstick above a hundred and fifty metres.)

Whishaw thanked Rapp and headed around the corner to a café, where he ordered an omelette and an Americano. He doesn’t actually believe in magic, he clarified. “Of course, lucky things can happen, but I don’t think they happen because you look at a candle.” As for his smoky quartz, he added, “I just like it aesthetically.” ♦